Quote:
Originally Posted by SIGSEGV
It looks like there were 175 flights/week between Calgary and Edmonton pre-pandemic. Now, some of these may be multi-hop flights and not necessarily easily displaced by a train unless the train actually stopped at the airports (which it could, mind you, and it might even be worth it to do that just for local traffic). I'm sure someone has O&D traffic between the two. But either way, it hardly needs to be high-speed rail service for the train to be a better option than flying (it's 260 km highway miles between the airports), which it seems many people are already choosing over driving or taking a bus, provided it's not made inconvenient in some other way.
On the other hand it looks like current downtown-to-downtown bus service takes over 4 hours based on the schedules I'm seeing, so maybe that's why flying is still so popular.
I bet if downtownish-to-downtownish rail service could be done in 3 hours and for $50 coach tickets and 7-10 frequencies a day, which doesn't seem like a huge ask (but I don't really know what sort of upgrades would be required to the existing track for that service... looks like it's pretty much all single track right now?), it would be very popular and worth it just from a carbon footprint perspective, not to mention convenience for Albertans.
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The cost is in multiple billions according to the last provincial study on a rail link, and the carbon aspect is objectively meaningless. This province generates an enormous amount of CO2 on an absolute scale and per capita, but it isn't transport between Edmonton and Calgary that causes that.
The reason we should build rail is as a quality of life improvement, saving time, increasing productivity and saving money on road upgrades. I personally am all for spending money on this, but we should not pretend it will be cheap nor pretend that our support is reflected in the wider population. And who can blame people? We live a good life out here and improved rail would hardly make a difference.
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